Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever

@Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it'⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  While I generally agree (and that applies to almost all “an LLM can’t do that” discussions):

  Head counts are not going to remain the same. Well, it might in writing, but there is a reason the WGA went on strike.

  If you can apply effective filters/transforms to a base texture, you can now do the same work that would have taken you weeks in a day or two. If you aren’t “wasting time” writing unit tests or making utility functions, you no longer need junior developers to punt the Charlie Work to. And so forth.

  In some fields? Being able to do more with less means you do a LOT more.

  But, generally speaking, that means you need fewer people and you pay fewer people.

  This is one of many many reasons that we need to have been exploring UBI decades ago. Because we are increasingly going to see a decrease in employment as technology is more and more able to “get the job done”. And unlike with farm work and factory work… there isn’t really anything on the horizon for all the “creative” workers to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI in big budget games is inevitable, say dev vets from Assassin's Creed and Everquest 2: 'Developers hate it … the money is still going to drive absolutely everybody to do it'⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know this is mostly posturing at this point but:

  “AI” has been in big budget games for decades. Hell, the big deal with Oblivion was that they had magic technology to procedurally place trees according to various heuristics. And I think that also added a resource management system to NPCs so that we could DB Apple them?

  Same with coding and art and sound and so forth.

  • All that cool magic wand and fancy ass filter shit in photoshop? Those are increasingly “AI” tools that will analyze the image and extrapolate what should or should not be “behind” something and so forth.
  • Coding? if you AREN’T using a tool to generate stubs and even tests at this point then you are wasting your own time.
  • Audio? Again, the same “AI” filters already exist. Same with tools to detect pauses or to split up dialogue and so forth.

  The reality is just using it effectively. Oblivion was boring as hell because the entire overworld was empty and lifeless. Same with BOTW. Whereas Ubi, for all their actual gameplay flaws, are spectacular at adding POIs and “events” in strategic locations so that you find something while you are hiking across a forest to get to an objective.

  Same with art and even CGI. You aren’t going to get a good outcome if you ask dall-e to make your art for you. But you are going to get good results if you start with a solid base and then procedurally add rust or spatter to it. You aren’t going to get a good result if you have your actors on a studio lit stage talking to nothing (Hi Prequel Trilogy). You are if you add lighting relative to the scene (The Volume) and use placeholders they can act off of.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tom Clancy Ghosh Recon Wildlands vs Breakpoint⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Neither? Wildlands has some REALLY shitty depictions of South America and Breakpoint is that modern day ubi-Clancy of “Are they ironically spewing right wing propaganda or?”. And Ubi in general is a company with rampant employee abuse of a sexual nature.

  That said: Wildlands is the much better game. Breakpoint “feels” better, but it is clear it was designed to be a co-op live game from the start with most of the missions not designed for AI. Whereas Wildlands was very much set up to just have three problematic bearded dudes lean out of a jeep and unload on anything you drive past.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Elite Dangerous studio Frontier Developments announce layoffs and "organisational review"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I obviously don’t have a deep insight into FDev’s finances. But they have pretty openly said that Elite is a foundation of the company.

  And yet, they have done everything they can to kill that. Cutting back on social media spending to more or less make every single Influencer say the game is dying. Turn updates into a trickle of “You know that thing that was added two years ago? They finally added enemy NPCs around it”. And even actively screw over the people who were dumb enough to buy the ten year pass by not even providing steam keys for the pre-ordered expansion (currently on two of ten or so?) to let people take advantage of Valve’s CDN.

  It is genuinely baffling. Other devs are, if anything, focusing too much on keeping the bread and butter live game “live”. Whereas FDev seem to have decided that they can do whatever to E:D and the money will keep flowing… which might be true but…

  Also, should be obvious but: Lapsed E:D fan who bought the lifetime pass like an idiot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.

  But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Bigot

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where can I find recipes without the author's personal anecdotes?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  From message boards that steal content from all other sites?

  Failing that: Paywalled sites that have a source of income that is not dependent on ads and SEO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where is the “solidarity” with the devs?

  People will constantly point to grey market sites like g2a and even gmg (g2a is really more of a black market site but…) and smugly mock anyone who DARES to buy a game new. Everyone cheers for (one of the daddies of gamergate) Total Biscuit’s mantra of never preorder and will insist that publishers and devs are trying to nickle and dime/steal from them for daring to release DLC for a three year old game.

  And then we wonder why studios shut down.

  So no, you aren’t looking for “solidarity”. You are so self obsessed with not getting what you want that you are recontextualizing it as everyone else is taking things away from you to get what they want.

  Because: I would love it if there weren’t giant conglomerations of studios. But then I remember how some of the best studios out there, such as Digital Extremes and Larian, have stories of “Yeah, it was make or break and we really lucked out with getting in on the ground floor of some new concept or marketing gimmick”. Like, we would not have Baldurs Gate 3 if Larian had waited even a year or so longer before starting the D:OS kickstarter. Because rather than people saying “oh shit, we can get a new classic CRPG” it would have been “Fuck kickstarter. It is all vaporware. You are a fucking mark if you give them money”.

  And if the choice is between having a different publisher on a game and hoping that enough folk from Obsidian end up in the same place to make another Pentiment or Tyranny? Fuck it, I’ll gladly let whoever keep the lights on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s Activision Blizzard deal approved by UK regulators⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It won’t fulfill your apparent need to have people pat you on the tummy and say you are a good boy but:

  PC more or less is THE second platform (or first, with console as second) for a lot of people at this point. So if the option is:

  1. Studio goes out of business because a great game didn’t sell amazingly well. See Mimimi for a “good” example of this
  2. Soft or hard acquisition results in games trapped on a single platform with questionable backwards compatibility policies. Bayonetta 2 and 3 being nintendo exclusives until the end of Nintendo is a “good” example of this
  3. Soft or hard acquisition results in game that is console exclusive to one platform, but also on PC

  I’ll always pick 3. Because as console prices increase? A “couple years old” gaming PC is not horrifically expensive (so long as crypto stays in the shitter…).

  But also? Shit like Geforce Now and other streaming solutions means that people (who don’t live in the ass end of nowhere and have such horrible internet they wouldn’t be able to download the day one patches anyway) can play these games on their macbooks or even their chromebooks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CD Projekt Red devs are forming a Polish games industry union after a wave of layoffs earlier this year⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is worth understanding that, at least historically, CDP is a lot closer to “Polish Electronic Arts” than a dev studio. Not sure how that has shifted over the past decade or so and the new approach to localization and distribution.

  I doubt they are going to shut the doors and move. But it is a possibility. Just cite that the CP expansion hasn’t sold well enough and they were still recovering from the initial bomb of CP and that they were counting on that Witcher 1 remake and it is a hard time financially and they would be operating at a much smaller capacity while they reorg. Do layoffs that are legally legit, and then reopen elsewhere citing concerns over geopolitics.

  But yeah. My money is more on satellite studios that eventually become the primary. Takes a few years longer but drastically reduces union power and gives a warning to the industry as a whole. And is generally the solution in these situations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"We Took a 100+ Hour Greyhound From Boston to Seattle"⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The East and (to a lesser extent) West Coast already do have quite solid coverage by train. High speed would be nice but the population density is also such that it probably isn’t worth it because of the frequent stops.

  But yeah. People really forget the scale of the US. Our one country is roughly twice the size of the EU. And while we have the densely populated areas that are comparable to “France to Belgium”, we have a LOT of empty flyover states that are comparable to the ass end of Norway and so forth.

  And in actual civilized countries? It is REALLY easy to take a train to a population center. Small town? You are probably catching a bus or renting a car.

  Don’t get me wrong. The US needs a LOT of work and, from looking at the amtrak route, there are a few extra lines that would actually connect the midwest/southwest pretty well. You still wouldn’t take a train from NYC to California but you might from Kansas to Chicago or whatever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube bans 3D print channel after manually reviewing its videos as suitable for monetization [Louis Rossmann explains the censorship]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are already distributed video hosting solutions. They all the same three problems:

  1. CSAM. Lemmy admins are already having to deal with assholes who upload child porn and then the federated instances who are less vigilant
  2. Discoverability: If we start having curated lists of what content people are willing to host then you will never see any new creators who didn’t get big elsewhere
  3. Monetization: This goes without elaboration

  So the end result is what we already see a lot of lemmy boards as. Just shamelessly copying anything popular off of reddit or hackernews.

  That is the issue with video hosting. You basically need an entire cloud compute business to even attempt to justify the costs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Youtube bans 3D print channel after manually reviewing its videos as suitable for monetization [Louis Rossmann explains the censorship]⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I wouldn’t be so sure Rossman would change his mind.

  He tends to very publicly say all the “free speech absolutionist” talking points and came pretty close to outright saying it during stuff like the guy who said something that sounded like a slur into his doorbell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The discussion is about the ongoing narrative that EA intentionally killed TF2 by releasing it too close to BF1 and CODIW. I pointed out that BF1 was not the juggernaut people think it is. You talked about how BF4 was a success even though it had a rough start… which is exactly what TF2 had.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait wait wait wait wait.

  Are you telling me that a game like BF4 can launch poorly but end up solid and successful?

  Here I was thinking if a game wasn’t the top seller on release day it was forever doomed and would kill a studio.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  BF1 followed Hardline which was almost universally mocked, 4 which is largely considered to be where things started going downhill, and 3 which was shit on for not being Bad Company 3 (… I can’t entirely disagree with that). It could just as easily have been a massive flop as a success (also, I personally never noticed the universal acclaim, but I do know it was generally tolerated).

  If a game is not allowed to even be released in the same quarter as a CoD then… yeah.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thanks to everyone who suggested i play Titan fall 2⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I REALLY hate the ongoing narrative that Titanfall 2 was sent to die or whatever.

  Titanfall 2 was made by Respawn. Respawn/Infinity Ward/Whatever They Were When They Did Medal Of Honor have been more or less defining mainstream first person shooters for decades at that point.

  And there is this idea that Battlefield 1 (and this was well after we had all decided we hated Battlefield) and CoD Infinite Warfare killed it.

  The reality is that it always had an uphill battle because Titanfall 1 was MP only and turned a lot of people off. And FPSes had largely become a “multiplayer genre” with the big surprise of 2016 being DOOM which… still mostly needed people to realize it was good after the “weird” trailers.

  The funny thing is that if Titanfall 2 had been Titanfall 1… either as pure MP or with TF1 having one of the all time great SP campaigns, it probably would have become the new Call of Duty in the same way that CoD became the new Medal of Honor. But instead it was a poisoned well released at a time when Gamers just weren’t interested in SP shooters.

  Similarly, if it had come out a few years later (after people remembered you could tell a story in a shooter), it probalby would have done gangbusters.

  But, like with most things, we instead blame EA. Because clearly EA were willing to piss away however much money Titanfall 2 cost to… get a really shitty VR game and make Vince Zampella work on Battlefield?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL: Gabe Newell has a second hobby next to Valve⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I was going to make a comment about how just because GabeN likes something doesn’t mean Valve is gonna do it but…

  Mother fucker is a knife nut. And CSGO pretty much made all live FPS game economies built around knife skins.

  So… yeah. Valve gonna be doing a racing sim. And that is probably WHY they are doing Deckard. GabeN needs his cockpit VR aid ain’t dealing with that Windows Mixed Reality shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Again, what does that have to do with anything here?

  Naughty Dog have not launched anything since the TLOU remake a year or two back. And WFH is not mentioned at all. So I have no idea where you are pulling your random ass talking points out of.

  Because this is a pretty bog standard “We have had a troubled development cycle and our publisher/parent company is cutting their losses”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because game dev, at the best of times, is a giant multi-year gamble. You have to hope that people like the game you are in year 3 on because you don’t have money to go much past 4. And you also have to hope that another more popular studio doesn’t release something similar that cannibalizes your sales.

  One way to make that safer? Get a publisher with deep pockets. Someone who can say “Hey, Elden Ring just came out and even has the same ‘there is a whole other world underground’ gimmick that you do. Can we delay your game for another six months but keep paying you the entire time?”

  And those kinds of publishers tend to prefer the big studios where pivoting to a new engine or making a prototype for a radical genre shift is viable.

  And this also applies to the insanely successful small studios. Dead Cells is a great example. Motion Twin is mostly a worker cooperative. This greatly limited its scalability (profit sharing for indie games doesn’t scale all that well) and resulted in a spin off of Evil Empire to manage Dead Cells.

  Unionization will go a long way toward avoiding the worker abuse inherent in game dev. But startups are dangerous no matter what industry you are in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Last Of Us Studio Naughty Dog Is Cutting Developers⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  … what? Does lemmy have karma bots that just fire off pre-written feel good comments? … Does lemmy have karma?

  What does that have to do with any of this. Where is the “long held product”? Hell, the sister article is even “Yeah… that MP mode is never coming out”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Prodeus: The Elder Veil - Reveal Trailer (DLC)⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I disagree regarding the map design being “unbelievably good” (a lot of it was “okay” to “good” with very few standouts) but yeah.

  It reminds me a lot of when Bloodstained and Timespinner came out. Both are unapologetic love letters to Symphony of the Night. Except…

  Bloodstained felt just as clunky and awkward as SOTN (I should know since I replayed SOTN in anticipation) with a lot of the same “good for the 90s…” design choices and mechanics.

  Whereas Timespinner straight up stole the menu. But also modernized the gameplay and filed off a lot of rough edges.

  End result is that Bloodstained played like SOTN and was carried by nostalgia and influencers. Whereas Timespinner played like what we remembered SOTN playing like… but didn’t have Iga.

  Same here. Games like Dusk, Project Warlock, and so forth all play like what we remember DOOM and Quake playing like. Prodeus… played like DOOM without the nostalgia factor.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Having trouble deciding what game to play next . which one of these games should i try⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Titanfall 2 is one of the greatest games of all time (I would say it is easily a top 50, maybe even a top 20). The singleplayer campaign is just ridiculously well designed and even has a surprising amount of pathos in the narrative.

  But if you are likely to be regularly interrupted? Horizon Zero Dawn. most of the story quests are 10-15 minutes each and you can just do the checklist open world the rest of the time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remedy says its Max Payne remakes are ‘a big, big project’ | VGC⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  DOOM and DOOM Eternal both did pretty well. And, truth be told, the pacing is not too dissimilar from a Call of Duty where it is a constant intensity with a few spikes for set pieces. Max Payne has a few “walk and talks” but mostly it is just about clearing rooms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What happened to online computer games?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As mentioned, Flash was sunsetted for a lot of reasons

  Unity and a few other game engines have “native” clients that can run in browsers and some promotional things have used them. Same with folk who go crazy with html5/js.

  But mostly? There isn’t a need anymore. Because it is easier to just make a phone app

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What games can you recommend that didn't get the appreciation that they deserved?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Obligatory: Roguelike (well, Roguelite but that starts getting into the berlin bullshit). Rogue is a class in tabletop RPGs and a historic game. Rouge is a bunny rabbit in sonic and a kind of makeup.

  That aside, here are a few off the top of my head:

  • Distance: Mostly a “beat the clock” style racing game in the vein of trackmania, although the synchronous MP with collision is a great time at a party. But it also has a weirdly good singleplayer campaign with both a narrative and some solid mechanics and set pieces. Also a ridiculous steam workshop presence
  • Tales of Maj’Eyal probably doesn’t belong here as I think it has been ridiculously successful for a game made by a small team and consistently comes up in discussions by anyone who is aware of what “the berlin interpretation” is. But it feels like it is almost completely ignored in the overall cultural zeitgeist when roguelikes/lites comes up. Which is a shame since TOME is very much a roguelike (technically lite, but… meh) with some solid design concepts. The vast majority of runs feel like they were “worth it” and even the early leveling has enough variety and wrenches that it feels less like you lost an hour of your life when you wipe and more like you get to do the Sand Worm again. Some of the unlocks are complete bullshit (although, I want to say the special magic trees were just made “free” because everyone hated it?), but it is generally the kind of game where you can work toward something with every run.
  • UFO: Aftermath/Aftershock (fuck Afterlight). Back in the dark ages between Silent Storm (WOOO) and the 2012 nu-XCOM, there were a lot of eurojank games in the genre. And while I don’t think UFO Aftermath was “good”, I do think it was competent. But mostly? It is probably the best Stargate SG1 game ever made. Because the devs were trying to cash in on that Jagged Alliance craze and made the human weapons stage a lot longer. So you might find yourself in an endgame with a few G36s backing up your plasma rifles as you fend off the obligatory base invasion. Aftershock, and especially Afterlight, lost a lot of this charm (because they are years later timeline wise) but were still fun
  • Silent Storm. Sorry, Silent Mother Fucking Storm, if we want to be specific. Alternate history WW2 where you play as a special organization for the Allies or Axis that are investigating a third party who have the potential to turn the war itself and blah blah blah. Mostly it is probably one of the best balanced JA2 style AP-based strategy games out there (just… get a save editor because the leveling/training is broken) with an emphasis on line of sight, trajectories, and full destruction of terrain. The kind of game where you might spend six “turns” getting your scout into position so that you can have your sniper plug a person from behind a wall, your machine gunner unload on people sleeping in a barracks, and your grenadier to… make the guard tower not exist anymore. All without ever directly targeting an enemy because you are fully operating based on magic radio commands or whatever. Again, this probably doesn’t belong here since anyone who liked JA2 back in the day was talking about this but it more or less fell off the face of the earth in favor of nu-XCOM.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SteamVR 2.0 beta adds tons of new features⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It is less about taking your HMD on the go and more about not needing a computer. For a lot of people, having a “gaming rig” is very intimidating. And, as the quest (and steam deck…) have shown, you don’t really need too powerful of a computer to run “basic” vr, but you do need the right ports and so forth.

  But also? A lot of people have a complete potato of a laptop that can’t even do that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Idris Elba: Actors in video games like Phantom Liberty is 'sign of the times'⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The problem is that he really IS wooden and obnoxious for basically the entire first two acts or so. It isn’t until you have that conversation outside the motel (?) that he is allowed any range.

  And… that is also around the time the game falls off massively in terms of quality. It isn’t quite Obsidian levels of “We ran out of money” but it definitely shows what they spent time on and what they just had to get working to release.

  Which sucks because that is actually when they delve into the character of Johnny (particularly WHY he hates Arasaka so much) and you start having actual conversations with him… unless it is a side mission where they all default to antagonistic first hour mode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SteamVR 2.0 beta adds tons of new features⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Speculation is strongly leaning toward it not being a standalone device and instead being in the WMR/PSVR space. Possibly coupled with a return of “Steam Machines” for a tv/console experience.

  I would still prefer a standalone/hybrid. But with wireless a lot of the need for that goes away. Same with if the Steam Deck is powerful enough for stuff like h3vr and other “standalone” levels of games (and, back of the envelope, it is very much capable of that).

  And I think the bigger advantage will likely be to focus on OS agnostic support for the HMD itself since that is kind of a cluster. Probably will still mean everything runs on steamvr (which makes porn apps a bit risky), but will couple well with unity’s cock up and people generally getting pissy if you remind them that “meta” is “facebook”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Idris Elba: Actors in video games like Phantom Liberty is 'sign of the times'⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There have been a lot of borderline stunt castings over the years. Patrick Stewart was in like 30 seconds of TES4 and Sean Bean was in about 10 minutes of it. Hell, Bruce Campbell was in all of Tachyon: The Fringe (which is like the fifth best space dogfighting game ever).

  But they were largely wasted. Kristen Bell… she is spectacular within a narrow range and “generic girl in the chair” is not it. And then there was the (alleged?) contract dispute that led to her being a baddy that gets killed off real fast. And that was largely the case. It was “get a b/c-tier actor/actress and find out that voice acting is very different than camera acting”

  In more recent years we started to see a big emphasis on VAs doing the motion cap as well and Christopher “Teal’c” Judge made Kratos “I moved to a non-extradition treaty pantheon” of Sparta into a woobie. And people very much underrate how good of a job Camilla Luddington and a few other performers have done over the years.

  But… we still have shit like Rosario Dawson in Dying Light 2 where “okay… she was there?”.

  For its many many many many many flaws and problematic aspects, I think CDPR did an amazing job with their “stunt casting” for Cyberpunk. Because Keanu knocked it out of the park (when he wasn’t just talking about his magnificent cock) and everything I have seen of Idris Elba’s performance is similar. And it kind of does mark a paradigm shift. Because it is no longer getting David Hyde Pierce to do a cameo as a camp gay counselor or a snooty over the top version of Niles. It is more like getting Ted Danson because you need a character who can simultaneously be a sleazy asshole and also the kind of person you just want to open up to and tell all your problems. It isn’t the kind of performance that you get for a single episode of sweeps week or to make people tune in even after your lead actor fucked off. It is the kind of performance you build a show/movie around.